WoW – More fun together!

Tanking 101: Respecing, Getting Started

So you want shorter queue times eh? Or you just want to try out this tanking stuff. Reaspecing as a tank is not very hard but I have heard several times that people tried it but did not like it. Or it was too much stress. I have also seen people trying to get into it the wrong way. Here is a quick how to guide to respeccing as a tank. This assumes you are already 80 and know the basics of the game. This will be a MUCH lower stress way of getting into tanking.

You don’t have to have uber gear to start tanking. In fact, with this plan you don’t even need crit immunity.

The first thing to do is STOP, LOG-OFF, and READ!

Go read some blogs about tanking. Go read all of my tanking 101 posts (see link on the sidebar). There are a lot of other good things out there so feel free to read more. Most importantly read up on what a real tank spec for your class is.

Something to keep in mind when reading is that some material is targeted at raid tanks tweaking for that last little bit of threat or that extra tiny bit of stamina. That is probably not you.

Respec carefully

Find a good spec online and then find 2 more that match it. Don’t just take one person’s word for it.

Re-itemize carefully

Find out your class’s hit and crit immunity numbers (defense cap or talents) and be sure you get there. If you use a shield get a good one. If you don’t have money or mats to get one crafted, go look up the best quest you can do which drops one and get that one. If you have any really weak slots, check and see if there is a quest drop upgrade for those slots and go do that too.

Re gem and enchant as much as you can. If you are not sure you will be a full time tank, get some armor pieces that are spare or alternates and gem those for tanking instead.

Don’t neglect your glyphs

The glyphs matter. Read up on which are good for tanking, also read other advice. Keep in mind that the advice out there will be raid oriented. If you can only afford one set of glyphs then DON’T do it yet. Wait until you try a couple runs and learn which abilities you actually USE in a rotation. Glyph those. If you are a bear get a glyph of maul before you do anything else. If you are a warrior get a glyph of sunder armor (it works with devastate too).

Getting started

Rotation

First off you need to know your rotation. There is good information about doing pulls out there but those are useless if you don’t know what to do right after the pull. So know what abilities to put in your rotation or priority list and practice them on the dummies. Read your abilities carefully and know which ones do a lot of threat and which don’t do any.

Pulls

If you absolutely have no clue on starting pulls, and/or have stage fright, get a friend and go do some quests or dailies. They can be DPS or heals. Your job is to pretend to tank. Just focus on keeping several things attacking you while they heal you or dps them down. This will let you play with a few pull tricks, some rotations and even taunts. Use them all and experiment. Feel free to round up more than you can handle and get yourself killed. That is part of the point of doing this with a friend in low stress. If you don’t have a friend do it solo; it is still good practice.

Run something

Do NOT queue for a heroic. I don’t care how good you were at DPS or healing. I don’t care if the tank set you built is 6k GS. If you are not used to tanking do NOT NOT NOT queue for a heroic run.

Queue for the lowest level regular run that you can. Pick a couple of them. Don’t put Occulus, ToC, PoS, HoR, or FoS in the list. Just don’t. Trust me.

Why? ‘Trust me’ was not enough for you? It is simple really. If you queue heroic you will get people that are uber at DPS and have zero patience or tolerance for a learner. You will also get every moron in gear made of paper and cardboard that just dinged 80 and thinks it is heroic time. Not queueing for heroics is the single most critical piece of advice I can give.

Also, the smart players, the experienced ones gearing up an alt, are all in the non-heroic runs. Particularly the non-heroics of the TOC and ICC 5mans. The average player in those runs is going to be more adept and understanding. So there will be fewer way out gearing you and fewer you have to carry if you avoid heroics.

If at all possible bring a friend. Any DPS class or healer is fine, just someone that knows you are learning and get watch your back a little bit. That will take a lot of the stress off. If you can, get a friend that plays a tank to come and dps or heal for you. They can give you advice on some of the more interesting pulls.

Heck, if you play on Ghostlands US whisper or ingame mail me (Reversion). I will be happy to give pointers any time I can.

Queue!

Now run regulars, then run some more regulars. Then run more. Get to know each one well. Now go run ToC regular. At some point, when you have done a lot and are confident in your gear, rotation and ability to do some basic pulls, queue for the ICC 5 mans. One at a time, in order.

Expect to wipe

Expect to have morons gripe at you. Expect to have morons do stupid stuff. If you let the healer die apologize. Feel free to tell the group you are new to tanking. Many hardcore players will tone it down and adapt when you give fair warning. Whatever you do, don’t take it personally. If you find yourself getting annoyed take a break. But don’t take a break for more than a day or two. You need to keep at it to get better. Also, if you are grinding runs remember, DPSers are very often willing to do several runs with a tank. Invite them to stay in the group. If you need to drop someone who is deadwood, invite the others to stay in whisper. Getting a couple people who are friendly, good, and know you are learning to queue with you will REALLY cut down on the stress.

If you have an IRL or guild friend giving helpful advice, remember to tell them to back off and let you play BEFORE you get the point of hacking them to death with a shovel. Accept the advice with a nod and then say ‘ok now let me try a few before you give me more pointers’.

Heroics

Above all, don’t set foot in heroics as a tank until you have run all of them on regular. Preferably until you have run them all until you know the pulls very well. And double preferably don’t run them until all your gear is purple 200 or better. Remember that the ICC 5 mans drop 219 on regular. Look up what drops for your class and makes sure you have it all before moving on (unless a badge piece is in reach).

So now you are in heroics and tanking. The only real advice I have left is to avoid heroic PoS and HoR for a while until you are really good with taunts and rounding up packs. Those are very nasty and can chew up and spit out a new tank.

Like this:

Related

12 Responses

Can we make this required reading for everyone who thinks “I R TANK ROAR FFS HEAL ME!!!!”?

I second, third and fourth the “bring a friend” suggestion. I still don’t tank alone on my warrior, even though I’ve been doing it for a while as offspec and I’m decent. I find tanking the most stressful role and I need moral support :) When I started tanking on my paladin, my healer was my friend whose main is a pally tank, so I got a ton of useful advice on the way.

Also, avoid Oculus if you don’t know the way. People will expect the tank to lead them, and flying around on dragons while everyone is going “WTF” and wandering around is not fun. If you do know how to lead, make sure you also know how the red drake works, OR hope there’s someone in the run who does.

I am sort of targeting these posts to people like that. and for folks that just don’t know where to start. I figure there are already plenty things out there that already have a start.

It is really handy as a starting tank to have someone /w-ing you with ‘no, to the left’ and ‘don’t forget this boss drops agro randomly’. Stuff like that.

For Oculus… Someone’s best bet is to get in there and heals or DPS and then once everyone leaves spend a few minutes flying around and getting your bearings. In fact, once you know what things look like you could do that outside the instance because the area is the same.
It is simple to navigate in there if you think of it as a building with 4 floors and each floor has several platforms. The first one has one big horseshoe shaped ring and then a boss platform, the second level is a horseshoe shaped ring and then 3 platforms, the 3rd is a full ring and 3 platforms that are slightly higher and the last ‘floor’ is the end boss which also has 3 platforms around it.

It is a lot like driving somewhere. I never really know how to get some place until I have driven there myself, not as a passenger.

One of the reasons I don’t drive is because I never pay attention as a passenger, so if I ever ended up behind the wheel I’d be lost, lost, lost… just like I always am in Oculus. (With 4 level 80 alts, that’s a bit embarrassing to admit… but I just blame it on my female lack of direction.)

Sunder armor glyphs with extra ‘tabbing’ or cleave glyph. Either can work. I am not enough of a min-maxer to know which is totally better but any knew warrior tank should get ONE of them certainly. Of course if you can get people to follow kill order then sunder armor glyph and heroic strike macroed to everthing is a much better combo. Not that people following kill order is likely.

What I do is key bind the 0123 on the number pad to Skull, X, etc. That makes hitting them fast and simple. Expecially the big ‘0’ key. I can get a skull on anything any time while not slowing my rotation.

I did pretty much what you suggested in running lots of normals (I also play a holy paly, a hunter and a rogue as my main characters… I also have 2 other level 80s as well) and got a bit of experience as a tank before I started doing heroics.

Once I started in on the heroics, I learnt a lot quite quickly and while we still died a bit, I was getting better.

I am now at the point where I can tank anything up to Ulduar (and I have main tanked an ICC25 rep run as well) and I am doing quite well. The problem I am finding is that there are a hell of a lot of elitist on EU-Anachronos and they wont take a tank into ICC10 unless they have a 5k+ GS.

I am thinking of just getting a bunch of like minded friends who dont care about gear score and giving it a bash running ICC10. If we wipe, then it is a learning experience.

That is about the only way to do it until you get over 5k. The funny thing is I have gone for or 6 bosses with two 4.8 gs tanks on 10 man and last night one of our tanks on 25 had 4.6! He was soft as heck but we did down the first 4. Of course he was the 3rd tank, but still…

Here are few of my advices to new tanks that were not mentioned above. When you attack pack of mobs (2+) always attack casters 1st. Why? Coz casters wont move to you as melee when you put them into combat unless you run behind some wall (pillar) and they cant see you in straight line. Most new tanks just rush into something while healers pick aggro from casters (seen this all the time in FoS mostly). So just try to attack casters first even with 1 hit, and dont be scared to tell your dps to wait few sec until you hit every mob at least 1 time. I can also tell you that best place to practice multi mob tanking is probably open IC field between ICC and Shadow vault where you can find lots of 5+ pack of mobs that do little dmg. When you open on group of mobs always start with your ability that hits multiple targets (like TC/shock wave as war, bloodboil as DK or avenging shield/consecration as paladin)… Practice and you will be good as time goes by! GL!

Thats what I usually try and do these days. I spot a caster in a group of mobs, I skull it and charge. All the melee come running in and if I have to step back so I can SW then followed up by a TC to get aggro.

I worked that out when I first run FoS. It worked well and has worked ever since.